


QuantumBranching’s alternate histories

by orphan_account



Category: Alternate History - Fandom - Fandom
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-11-14
Updated: 2019-11-14
Packaged: 2021-01-30 21:16:35
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 2
Words: 1,220
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21434827
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/orphan_account/pseuds/orphan_account





	1. Napoleon the Victorious

In this world, Napoleon successfully pulled off an invasion of England (Nelson dies young? The French navy adopts explosive cannonballs? Some bright guy invents the steamship early?), and avoided an invasion of Russia.  
  
  
It’s 1910, and the last French forces have just left England. It has been decided that keeping a pro-French government in power by force of arms is really more trouble than it’s worth: keeping England quiet has been a headache for over a century, and Imperial France has bigger worries. Rising lower-class radicalism and Dutch seperatism at home, unrest in India and the Persian Gulf, the usual grumbling in the Germanys, the naval race with the US, and the looming menace of Russia from the Baltic to the Himalayas.  
  
Russia, although it avoided the sacking of Moscow (modern development has, alas, done almost as much damage as the fires of our TL), suffered some serious smackdowns at the hands of France in the early 19th century, leading to an enlarged Poland and the return of Finland to Swedish rule. As a result, Russia was rather less complacent about it’s military strength 1815-1855, and made more energetic efforts to modernize than in our TL: not particularly effective ones, being Czarist Russia, but the Russia of Czar Boris is noticeably more industrialized and militarily formidable than that of Nicholas II. Kept out of European affairs, it also expanded eastward more energetically than in our TL.  
  
Austria accepted Napoleon’s peacemaking gift of Silesia rather ungratefully, but over the last century dynastic ties and a common dislike for nationalist upsets have led to a fairly cordial relationship. The present Kaiser, trying to avoid falling too closely into the French orbit, has tried to maintain an equally polite relationship with Russia, but of late this has been strained by the ambitions of Russia’s Bulgarian ally, which has been stirring up trouble among Austria’s Serbian subjects, a policy which although unsupported by the Czar has supporters among Russia’s ultra-nationalists.   
  
After the fall of Britain, France returned in glory to Egypt. The opening of Palestine to Jewish immigration was a whim of the elderly Emperor, but has yielded dividends in the one solidly pro-French state in the area. The French speaking Jewish state, it’s population greatly increased in recent decades by refugees from Russian Pogroms, is solidly pro-Empire, and the Imperial government in response carefully ignores the grumbling of the Catholic church, who finds the notion of a bunch of Jews running the Holy Land rather disgusting (as long as they show no signs of converting, anyway).  
  
Japan was opened at gunpoint as in our world, but the timing was different, which has had knock-on effects on the timing of its modernization. Japan is only now growing militarily strong enough to start thinking of expansion abroad, but there appear to be few avenues for such activity. Korea is Russian, and both France and the United States are opposed to any carve-ups of what is left of China. Taiwan, perhaps? But under what excuse? Efforts are being made to form an anti-Russian alliance with the French, but France is skeptical of Japanese military capacity.  
  
Without the humiliation of the Franco-Prussian war, the French Empire doesn’t have the chip on it’s shoulder that in our TL led it’s officers to seek glory through colonial conquest. With England, Germany, and the Netherlands out of the game, and the US and Austria not really interested, much of Africa and SE Asia has remained uncolonized, although missionaries and arms-dealers remain influential. A slowly modernizing Thailand has recently split Cambodia with the Vietnamese empire: border disputes have started already. Australia is oddly similar to OTL: the French emperors found the notion of a dumping ground for undesirables useful enough, and deported even more people to Australia than the British did. New Zealand AKA New Brittany, on the other hand, is more thinly settled and more Maori than in our timeline.   
  
The United States is not too dissimilar to that of our timeline – rich, democratic, powerful and even more convinced of it’s exceptionalism in a world where Europe has been under the Napoleonic heel for a century. It’s population has a higher proportion of English (refugees from Napoleon), fewer Poles and Jews: it is even less tolerant of Catholics, in a world where the Catholic Church is seen to some extent a tool of the Empire. Possibly less racist: the theory of evolution was developed by a German scientist a couple decades later than Charles Darwin, and “scientific” racism is only just starting to catch on. There still was a civil war, although the timing and sequence of events differed, and the South still lost. Canada, briefly the kingdom-of-England-in-Exile, was before long given an offer it could not refuse: the French Canadians, after a period of loose association with the US, eventually ended up a nation of their own (at the time, there was too much worry that forcing them to stay might trigger French intervention).   
  
Relations with the Empire are prickly: although the French parliament has gained real powers in recent years, the Empire is still ultimately a police state dominated by army, bureaucracy and the Palace. There is also the French tendency to fish in Latin American waters: although the aging and hemorrhoid-ridden Napoleon felt he had as much work as he could handle simply keeping a member of his family on the Spanish throne without also reconquering Latin America for him, his successors never paid much attention to Monroe’s pronouncements, and French efforts to gain political control in Argentina around the turn of the century nearly led to war. Feelings ran very high at the time, and although relations are now more correct, the French and the US continue their contest to build the world’s largest and fanciest fleet – something the French, with their myriad commitments, are finding increasingly unaffordable.  
  
Meanwhile, in a somewhat seedy Boston mansion, the current heir to the house of Saxe-Coburg-Gotha awaits the call from England….


	2. A more rational Europe

Relatively minor one...in this TL, a more conventional miltary Junta came to power in Germany, WWII did not break out, and nobody invested much in atomic research...save for Mussolini, looking for new routes for national glory when his efforts to break up Yugoslavia did not yield much.  
  
The world's first atomic bomb went off in the Libyan desert in 1953, and Musso quickly moved to take advantage of his brief nuclear monopoly by beating up on the Greeks, the Serbs, and the French. (The last nearly undid him - the French were impolite enough to keep shooting down his limited supply of nuclear bombers, and rather nearly suceeded in invading Italy in spite of the strategic use of atomic bombs in the mountainous NW. Italy won, but it was a near thing).   
  
Some 15 years later, Mussolini lies dying, and the future looks iffy. Italy won enough prestige to build an alliance of fascistic and right-wing regimes, but it is probably weaker than any of the other three major powers - the Soviets, the US, and the anti-Italian European Defense pact and their British allies. Italy's most powerful ally, the Empire of Japan, has been forced to withdraw from most of China by a Communist insurrection backed by Moscow, although reports of the brutality of the revolutionary government have temporarily stregnthened the position of it's colaborators in Manchuria.   
  



End file.
